


Her Lover (My Molly)

by smolqueernerds



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/F, I can't believe I wrote a /OFC fic, This Fandom Needs Femslash, first person POV, i suck at summaries, the mysterious lover is totally female Fight Me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 05:06:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6786430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolqueernerds/pseuds/smolqueernerds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A love long lost, remembered (exploration of Persephone's canonical mysterious dead-or-overseas lover).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her Lover (My Molly)

When Blue was littler, back when Calla asked why she was worried about infectious diseases and after she discovered yogurt but before she started taking a pair of scissors to everything around her, she asked me if I'd ever been in love.  
I said yes. A short word, an easy one.  
She asked who I’d been in love with, and what they were like.  
I was going to answer her, I was. But by the time I knew what I was going to say it was dark and she was gone and Maura’s head was poking through the door telling me to come down for dinner.  
I think Blue asked Calla and Maura about it afterwards, but any picture she drew from what they could have given her would have been muddled and indistinct. They can't know much about it. I never told them, or anyone. I would have, though. I think I would have tried if they'd only asked.  
Blue was the only one who ever asked, but I wasn't fast enough.  
I still have the answer stuck inside of me. Countless things are stuck inside of me, really, but this one stands out.   
If I close my eyes and reach down, it's still waiting below, in the blackness between my lungs.

When I was shorter and not quite ripe I knew a girl with a name like the first sound everyone learns to make, and it was terrifying how easily she became the center of my everything. She smelled like copper and wishing and new growth. She tasted like bourbon and pomegranates and salt. She had freckles on her shoulders and a scar on one knee and she was beautiful like mountain streams, silvery bright and far too quick to chase or catch. For a while she tried to slow, to let me keep pace with her, but she couldn't help but leave me behind in the end.  
Her name was Molly. I’m nearly sure she was Molly. It could have been Millie or Mary. Or Maura, perhaps--- but no, Maura’s napping downstairs, and I don't think there were any other Mauras. One’s so much already. You must excuse me, Blue, it's difficult to fit all these words together.

(That's a lie, just a little bit of one. I lie sometimes, because I need to remember that I can. Bad things can happen when I forget. The truth is that some days, for a few hours, my world looks more like the world everybody else sees. They draw closer together and it's easier to bridge the gap. It was one of those times when she asked. It is one of those times again now.)  
(I usually spend those hours upstairs in bed with the covers over my head, waiting to drift away again. Cowardice, I think Calla would call that, or something shorter and harder that means the same. I know it is, but this world’s just so much brighter and harder and sharper than mine, and I'm scared of what it can do to me. I am not Maura or Calla or Blue or any of the others. They have their own brightness and hardness and sharpness, and when this world pushes them, they can push back. If I try to push, I will crumble.)

Molly (MillieMaryMaura) hated coffee and always wore gloves and she studied all the ways the universe fits together and whispered the words of it in my ears like incantations and poetry and love letters. She said she didn't believe in magic, but she did, really. Not my kind, not our kind, but the kind that calls itself science and pretends changing a thing’s nature through its name isn't a spell. She believed in formulas and constituents and models and theories. I could have shown her proof of my kind if I tried hard enough, but I think it would have shaken her beliefs hard enough to break something essential in her, and anyway I rather liked her stubbornness.  
Well, no, that's not right. I loved it, just the way I loved the funny shape of her laugh and the sway of her hips when she walked and the way she always tried to guess what I was thinking: too much, so much it twisted all my insides into a tangle of sweet-sour ache and left my soul gnawing for more more more.  
I loved her so much that I lied to her, over and over and over, and I forgot how to feel bad about it.  
“Will you ever leave me?” she whispered at night in my ear, breath ticklish and anxious. “Tell me you won't, Persephone. Please just promise me.”  
“I wouldn't leave you for anything ever,” I told her every time, leaning my head on her shoulder and folding my limbs around hers until we fit just how I wanted. “Never ever ever. I swear.”  
Maybe she knew it was a lie. Maybe that's why she left me, so I wouldn't leave her first.   
Oh, Molly. I would have left you if I’d needed to, but I would never have wanted to. You of all people should have understood. You should have tried to understand. It wasn't all my fault.   
She left me to follow the dream of who she wanted to be. I wonder if she found it. I wonder if my name and face have slipped away from her the way hers have from me. She was always so much better than me at remembering, but maybe she didn't want to remember.  
There's an ocean between us now. I used to travel to the edge of it and stand, up to the ankles in fine powdery sand, watching the sea and sky converge. Sometimes, her face formed in the clouds. Sometimes, the wind sounded like her sighing. Sometimes, a boat bobbing out in the swells looked just like the one she sailed away in, and when it turned around and headed for shore, a feverish, useless hope throbbed in my chest, but she was never among the passengers who disembarked. Of course she wasn't.  
It's been years since I've seen the ocean, which is a sad thing in itself. Someday, maybe, I will go again, and neither clouds nor wind nor boats will make me think of her. 

(I can feel the edges of things blurring. The gap between worlds is widening once more. And though I am relieved to leave brightness and hardness and sharpness, I am surprised to find that I…. I do not wish to leave Molly’s memory behind.)

(I don’t want to let her go again.)

(But I will always let her go.)


End file.
